Harmony Hammond: Crossings + Accumulations

Harmony Hammond: Crossings + Accumulations brings together documentation of two recent exhibitions of the artist’s work, Crossings and Accumulations, at Alexander Gray Associates. Featuring large-scale, textured, surface-heavy canvases, both exhibitions further refine the artist’s interest in “material engagement” to expand and subvert the narrative of modernist abstraction. In these series, the artist imbues abstraction with bodily content, embodying her belief that materials and the ways they are manipulated can bring social and political content into formal abstraction. The book features Hammond’s own writings about Crossings, along with an essay on her overall practice by scholar Alex Bacon.

For years, Hammond has worked with found and repurposed materials and objects such as rags, straw, latex rubber, hair, linoleum, roofing tin, and burnt wood as well as buckets, gutters, and water troughs as a means of introducing content to the world of abstraction. Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction and at the same time insist on an oppositional discourse of feminist and queer theory. Their focus on materiality and the indexical, suggesting topographies of body and place, derives from and remains in conversation with her feminist work of the 1970s.

Harmony Hammond (b.1944) is an artist, writer, and curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she attended the University of Minnesota from 1963 to 1967 before moving to New York in 1969. She was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York (1972) and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989 to 2006.

A survey exhibition of Hammond’s work, Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, was presented in 2019 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum, Ringling College of Art and Design, FL, in 2020. Other one-person exhibitions of her work include Becoming/UnBecoming Monochrome, RedLine, Denver, CO (2014); Big Paintings 2002–2005, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM (2005); Monster Prints, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2002); and Ten Years 1970–1980, Glen Hanson Gallery and W.A.R.M, Minneapolis, NM (1981), among others. Her work has also been included in many group exhibitions, including Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021), traveled to Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, Spain (2021); Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007), traveled to National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2007), MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008), and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia (2008), among others.

Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2014); the Lifetime Achievement Award, Women’s Caucus for Art (2014); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association (2013); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2007 and 1989); and Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1998), among others. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. Her archive is housed at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.